[xmonad] XMonad.Actions.Search: Issue with escaped URL

[Platon Pronko]

Hi!

The issue is that search/promptSearch use safeSpawn internally, and safeSpawn does not deal with non-ASCII characters correctly (see https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2020-April/015370.html and https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2020-April/015371.html).

You can work around that, but since the call stack is slightly deep you will need quite a lot of code. Here's the snippet I that I tested on my machine, seems to work correctly:

safeSpawnUnicode :: MonadIO m => FilePath -> [String] -> m ()
safeSpawnUnicode prog args = io $ void $ forkProcess $ do
   uninstallSignalHandlers
   _ <- createSession
   executeFile prog True args Nothing

ponsSearchEngine = searchEngineF "pons" (\s -> "https://de.pons.com/übersetzung/französisch-deutsch/" ++ (escape s))

-- copied from XMonad.Actions.Search because it does not exort Search constructor
data SearchCopy = SearchCopy Name
instance XPrompt SearchCopy where
     showXPrompt (SearchCopy name) = "SearchCopy [" ++ name ++ "]: "
     nextCompletion _ = getNextCompletion
     commandToComplete _ c = c

promptSearchUnicode :: XPConfig -> SearchEngine -> X ()
promptSearchUnicode config (SearchEngine name site) =
     mkXPrompt (SearchCopy name) config (historyCompletionP ("SearchCopy [" `isPrefixOf`)) (\query -> safeSpawnUnicode "firefox" [site query])

showSearchPrompt = promptSearchUnicode myXPConfig ponsSearchEngine

Best regards,
Platon Pronko

On 2020-06-12 15:59, Christian Heinrich wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've started to use XMonad.Actions.Search and I'm trying to define my own SearchEngine as follows:
> 
>> searchFunc :: String -> String
>> searchFunc s = "https://de.pons.com/übersetzung/französisch-deutsch/" ++ (escape s)
>> pons = searchEngineF "pons" searchFunc
> 
> The german umlauts ü and ö are actually part of the URL. According to the documentation,
> searchEngineF should not handle any escaping (unlike searchEngine), but the URL that is opened for "a" is
> 
> https://de.pons.com/%C3%83%C2%BCbersetzung/franz%C3%83%C2%B6sisch-deutsch/a
> 
> I can't find what I'm doing wrong even when looking at the source.
> 
> Could anyone point out to me how to open that URL without escaping anything? I'm just surprised that
> the base-URL is escaped as well, and not just the argument. I'm pretty new to Haskell and would be
> grateful for any hint.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
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